God forbid you want to convert an image.
If you do, you have two broad choices. You can be blessed with the knowledge that your computer knows how to do this incredibly simple task and thus offers direct support for it. Golden Boy macOS has done this since time immemorial (mainly because I forgot) and offers "Convert Image" when you right click any image file under Quick Actions.
If your computer doesn't offer a nice, simple, integrated way of doing this, you have to open an app or worse - go to a website.
Free Convert Image PNG JPEG Conversion Online Free Tools Online Image is that website. It's not real, not strictly speaking, it's just a concept I made up for this essay, but it does spiritually exist. Everyone who's had a problem that by all means a computer should easily solve regardless of what's installed on it but doesn't has encountered these. Shitty Bootstrap (or sometimes even, shudder, WordPress) affairs that do their job, admittedly, but are infested with ads, tracking, unnecessary logins. Tools that offer a superficially complicated problem solved, like background removers or font converters, are very notorious for this.
I, like everyone else, was sick and tired of this. These tools are simple. They have no dependencies. Every computer should be able to do this, and no, memorising ImageMagick and FFMpeg spells doesn't count.
So I created delphitools.
delphitools is a set of (at the time of writing) 45 different tools that all run in your browser and each solve one specific problem I have personally had. It adheres to the UNIX philosophy, "Do one thing and do it well". Each tool serves a specific purpose. The image converter converts images. The regex tester validates regex. The palette generator gives you randomly generated colour palettes, you know how these things work. It's by no means original. Other tools like this have been built before, and they will continue to be built. I just wanted a way to access all of those in a central way, so I made one.
Of course I am a designer. I come from the land of the visual. I can build beautiful UIs, plan out structure and experience, and am not entirely talentless when it comes to web development, which I used to do entirely by hand in the text editor. I have a bachelor's degree and a bit more experience than is necessary for that to be respected. I am not, however, a programmer.
Readers familiar with the subject (hello!) will know where this is going. This is the part where I will tell the tale of having discovered Claude Code and subsequently learning to worship at the altar of Lord Amodei and his head wizard Boris Cherny, but my ambitions for this piece aren't quite this fluffy. Yes, Claude Code is genuinely quite excellent. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe, yada yada yada. It's a good tool, and I like using it.
So of course, having built personal software since the late 2010s to fix my own grievances in the world, I also used it for delphitools. This was before Opus 4.5, so while it was competent it wasn't exactly brilliant, and a low stakes local-only set of tools that only exist to make my life easier seemed like the perfect test bed. Lo and behold, with my guidance and a good amount of open-source libraries, it did do a more than passable job at fixing UI and functionality that I couldn't be bothered with or simply wasn't knowledgeable enough for.
Then I published delphitools, and went viral twice.
I can honestly say that this wasn't intended. I thought it would be nice if some friends had a good set of tools to make QR codes and crop images, and specifically I also thought about my husband doing low-level chores at the local library that require image cropping, background removal and QR code generation, but I never expected it to be quite viral. And yet, if my Cloudflare analytics are to be believed, around 50k unique visitors per week, and 2.6M requests in the same time, which is free on Cloudflare because I optimise my software, thank you very much.
However the conversation soon becomes one you can't control. While I have had around a hundred comments assuring me personally of the fact that I am a saint rivalling the proportions of Mary Magdalene, I can't reiterate enough how what I did isn't unique. All of these tools are easy to build, and a shocking number of them are just wrappers around interface surfaces JavaScript already offers you. You could write down random six-digit hex numbers on a piece of paper too. You don't need my palette generator for this.
So imagine my surprise when Bluesky and Tiktok got hold of these tools.
Since they're mostly visual in nature, it was obvious that artists would find them useful, and the average modern digital artist sits at a quite serendipitous intersection of the cutting edge of the technology world and the old guard. Many modern artists - especially young ones that mostly clink their original characters together - have quite strong opinions about the nature of art that I have to assume are informed by passion rather than discourse. It was only a matter of time before one of them audited the open source code and saw that Claude had a hand in creating delphitools.
This is, to the modern artist, an insult.
Specifically it's an insult because the online artist crowd is very unfortunate in the way they've historically been treated. Posting your art on Instagram or any of its contemporaries is by most accounts a fools errand, and having run that gamut myself I can only agree. I made some excellent friends and met my dear husband, but I wouldn't exactly say I've become "famous" as an artist. My 300 followers haven't changed since the pandemic.
This is slight one against the artist, but by no means the only one. Meta in specific takes what can only be described as a gleeful contrarian stance towards artists, first in sanitising their metaverses to terminal boredom, then in convincing everyone that AI chat and AI accounts on Instagram is something we should want. I can only assume they've been cursed by a witch in the basement of the old Sun Microsystems building that made them terminally out of touch with reality.
OpenAI is of course also not blameless here. Introducing a product like ChatGPT and unleashing it on the general public was a move that I hope in retrospect gets treated like the discovery of asbestos, and hasn't exactly shown humanity's greatest side. When it came out in November 2022 (What a year!), nobody, especially not OpenAI, knew what to do with it.
It took us about two more years to figure that out and for the models to actually become good enough to be useful for anything that's not what we'd call slop these days. The tech industry broadly but small-batch programmers specifically has mostly caught up to this fact, and I'm not the only person that thinks Claude Code is an indispensable tool on the modern coder's tool belt now.
Not only should this not be controversial if you, y'know, have eyes, but it should also be natural. If it should be embraced or if it's ethical is not something I'm particularly interested in answering, but knowing I eventually have to, I'll get back to it later - but the point I'm trying to make is that a changing of the guard like this has already happened. Before compilers, people had to write machine code. After compilers, they could use COBOL or FORTRAN or ALGOL or any other combination of uppercase letters, and the quality of code generally went up. This in my opinion is very similar to what's happening with "Agentic Development", a term so deeply useless and loaded it could only have come from San Francisco.
Still, I get around one email per week asking if and how AI is used in delphitools. The answer I give is always the same: I use it, I think it's useful, I made the tools for myself, and even if I didn't I can't guarantee any of the libraries are free of it either.
I get this question mostly from the kind of artists mentioned before, and the resonance is rarely positive - Twitter is busy worshipping the machine god and Bluesky/Tiktok are refusing to see that they're standing in moving water. Either way, the core of the emails is commonly some flavour of "I hope you're not using generative AI".
Let's assume that what they mean are attention-aware transformers like those found in modern LLMs and maybe also diffusion models like those used by most modern text-to-image generators. And if that's the category, Claude Code falls into that category quite clearly.
While these people rarely voice their concerns directly, instead using words like "slop" as a shibboleth to insert all of your own preconceptions about why the tech is bad into the conversation at hand, I think we can pretty clearly extrapolate them. To them, AI use is unethical, lazy and diminishing of the craft it nominally replaces or supports.
If you'll permit, dear reader, I'd like to address those points individually. First, and this is the most important one I believe, is this ethical?
Frankly, I think it can be. The question at hand is whether or not the training data and the resources needed for LLM operations are "worth it", and on the average I think it's a complicated question for many reasons but I'd lean towards yes. The most obvious aspect of this is where to get the training data - and don't think I forgot for a second that Anthropic Grinch-style took, like, four million books from the Pirate Bay. I don't really think that was the best look, but I don't agree with people who find it "unethical" per se. This is because I do not believe in the concept of copyright.
This is maybe the most radical position in this essay, so allow me to expand. I'm not arguing that training on GitHub open-source code should be permitted. That is a legal argument. I am not a lawyer. In fact, I think the entire framework of ownership that would make it permissible or not is fundamentally flawed. I do not believe that copyright serves the interests of the individual artist or programmer in any comparable way to how it serves the corporations of the world. Copyright is a rat's nest of provisions and loopholes only exploitable by companies with the resources to do so. The copyright office is not your friend, and I think it's frankly a marketing feat of herculean proportions that we all accepted the framing of "copyright infringement equals theft". I really thought we figured out during the F.A.S.T. era that that was just corporate bootlicking. So, is it ethical? Um, I, uh, what are you, a cop? Get a warrant.
The next argument is that it is lazy. I'd push back on that, and colleagues in the tech industry would too. This is only anecdotal, I realise this, but the generally accepted stance is that "if it gets the job done, it's good". I mean, what do you really think programming is? Is it coding? If it's just that, you may have a point, but it's not. It's conceptualising a problem, turning it over, thinking about how to solve it, choosing what to work on and what not, identifying the problems to solve in the first place, and how to go about doing that. The compiler didn't make anyone a "better" programmer that wasn't already an at least passable one before, and same with this.
Then, is it diminishing the craft of those that chose not to use the coding harness? Again, I don't really believe so. I don't much care how the sausage is made once it's done. If you insist you're better than Claude at coding, that's fine, I believe you. If you see your code as art that a machine can't or shouldn't make, then yes, by all means, power to you. I don't think that applies to delphitools. Despite the ambitions of helping an artist (myself), delphitools itself is decidedly not art. It enables art and it contains art, maybe, but it itself isn't. I'm not going to provide an artisanal hand-written hex generator when the machine can do it in a fraction of the time, just as good, and frankly I don't owe any of you anything.
Should you use LLMs for art? Well, I'm not the boss of you, but I'd prefer you didn't. I don't particularly find that kind of content interesting, mostly because by definition machines can't make art and by function are very bad at approximating the process non-deterministically. Machines don't have anything to say, and it shows.
No, I don't want to look at AI-generated images, music, text or any other form of data usually described as "art". I prefer my art to be made by humans, and I don't think that conflicts with my stance about honestly quite liking Claude. These are entirely separate domains, and thinking one of them infringes upon the other is the wrong way to think about art. They're only getting away with this because we call it "AI art". We wouldn't be having this conversation otherwise. Don't let the tech bros tell you about your area of expertise.
And frankly, even if delphitools was 100% AI-made (it isn't) and only exists as an exercise to piss "real programmers" off (it doesn't), look what I'm arguing here. The toolkit is sound. It does the job of replacing at least 45 shitty ones that want your email and the permission to put its and its 748 marketing partners' cookies onto your device.
At the end of the day, I'll use it to make QR codes. I shared it so Martha from Wisconsin can also make QR codes. And if that means she won't have to go to one of the predatory ones that charge you a dollar per code, my work will be done.